Building a school in Yaounde, Cameroon

Requested by

Who are you trying to help? What issue are you trying to address?

Rapid urbanization is leading to an explosive increase of the population in metropolitan areas in Cameroon such as the city of Yaounde. While the increasing population is bringing a huge number of social and economic problems, the impact of job and training availability, and the physical, social and cultural quality of urban environment on marginalized people is enormous, affecting their living conditions and well-being so that many of them through frustration and lack of options, retire to the urban slums and or peripheral villages of the cities.

Moreover , overcrowding of the limited educational institutions within the cities and an almost complete lack of such educational institutions within urban slums and peripheral villages means that thousands of low income families can’t gain access to and can’t afford education for their children.

The goal of the Precious Kids School project is to construct a child-friendly school that will benefit the students, parents, and residents of a subdivision pn the outskirts of Yaounde which has too few schools to serve an estimated population of 25 000 inhabitants.

What is your project and how will it help?

The project goal is to construct a child-friendly school that will benefit the students, parents, and residents of a subdivision on the outskirts of Yaounde where there are too few schools to serve the population. All funds raised for this project will go toward building materials and labour needed to construct an 8-classroom building. Part of the money will be used to finance the educational needs of underprivileged children including orphans who for various reasons are not in school.

This school building project will benefit the community in two distinct ways. Firstly, the project will enable students to stay at the school and attend without the difficulties of travelling a long distance each day. As of now, over half of the students walk to neighbouring villages or to the city to attend school. This project will allow the students, ages 3-12, to stay and go to school in their own community, rather than walking every day to a school outside of their community. As many as 500 students could attend the school each year.

The second advantage of the project will be to enroll girls in the school and conduct a series of workshops on the importance of girls’ education. Few parents send their girls to school because they would rather have them stay at home and help with the cleaning, cooking and or petty trading. They are brought up to think their education is not worthwhile, for their future is inevitably to stay in the home. In addition to the construction of the building, sessions will be held by OFLIC staff, alongside the Parent Teacher Association to promote the enrolment of girls. We will have monthly interactive sessions on family development. Empowering women and girls within the community and what role that plays in development are critical issues that we will discuss and look at ways to address these issues.

How can other people partner with you on your project?

We need people who can assist us with school materials including books, furniture, equipment and other scholastic materials that can be distributed to needy children. We need financial assistance that will enable us to undertake the construction work. Some of this assistance could be in kind (equipment, cement, wood, etc.).

People could provide us with a school bus, pay the salaries of our teachers. Others could volunteer in school management and or teaching positions.

We would welcome any form of assistance that anybody can give us to enable us achieve our goal.

Please detail the resources that you need.

We need a lot to get this project running and successful, we welcome any form of support.

The cost of constructing a class room is 14,000 Euro
- 100 bags of cement a bag costs 10 Euro
- Roofing sheets (zinc), a bundle costs 250 Euro
- 30 computers for the school IT lab
- Didactic material for teachers
- Salary for teaching staff. There will be 18 teachers each having a minimum salary of 100 Euro per month
- A school bus for transporting students and for our community literacy programme
- Volunteer teachers
- School fees for underprivileged children a school year cost 200 Euro per child